Bulls running out of time to fix ailing defense
With one week remaining in the NBA regular season, the Bulls did something Monday that hasn't happened often - a full practice at the Advocate Center.
With the NBA spreading out the schedule to reduce back-to-back games a few years ago, the in-season practice time has dwindled. In the Bulls' case, the less they practice, the more their defense tends to slip.
So maybe this was a chance to right the ship heading into a tough set of back-to-back home games against Milwaukee and Boston. Coach Billy Donovan said the team did some full-contact scrimmaging Monday. Zach LaVine (knee) and Alex Caruso (back) did not practice, but are expected to play against the Bucks on Tuesday. Milwaukee is projected to have its regular lineup available.
Here's a rundown of where things stand for the Bulls with four games remaining:
• Their magic number to avoid the play-in tournament is one, which means that can only happen if the Bulls lose their final four games while Cleveland wins its last three.
Otherwise, the Bulls will be locked into either the fifth or sixth seed. At the moment, they are tied with Toronto for fifth and own the tiebreaker.
• With Miami beating Toronto on Sunday without Jimmy Butler, the Heat has taken command of the No. 1 seed in the East, up by two games with three left to play.
That means the Bulls' first-round opponent will almost certainly be Boston, Milwaukee or Philadelphia. All three are tied in the loss column for second through fourth place, which makes it tough to predict which team the Bulls could end up facing.
The Bulls seem to match up best with Boston, though the teams haven't met since the Celtics went on a hot streak. The Bulls went 0-4 against the Sixers, but that team figures to still have developing chemistry between Joel Embiid and James Harden. If it's Milwaukee, well, that would be a tough task.
"We want to finish the season off strong and win as many games as we can," center Nikola Vucevic said after practice. "So hopefully we can do that and finish fifth. As far as matchups and all that, I don't pay attention to it. If you want to be one of the best teams, you have to play everybody at some point, so we just have to get ready for anybody."
Donovan said there wouldn't be an update on Lonzo Ball's status until Tuesday or Wednesday. He's trying to ramp up his activity again after taking a 10-day break from running. He's been out since Jan. 14 recovering from arthroscopic knee surgery.
At the end of Monday's practice, Donovan spent a long time giving instructions to rookie point guard Ayo Dosunmu and demonstrating pick-and-roll coverages with the help of an assistant coach. Coby White, who has gone 2-for-24 from 3-point range over the last five games, did some shooting with player development staffers running at him as mock defenders.
The Windy City Bulls season ended on Saturday, so Marko Simonovic and two-way players Tyler Cook and Malcolm Hill are back with the team. Two-way players are eligible for the playoffs this season.
Defense is likely the key to the Bulls staying competitive in the playoffs and it's not trending in the right direction. Miami scored 127 points at the United Center on Saturday, the Heat's second-highest point total since October.
In October, the Bulls ranked sixth in the league in defensive rating and were 11th in November, In the four months since then, they ranked 22nd, 25th, 23rd and 21st. Losing Ball might explain some of that, but certainly not all of it.
Maybe the Bulls can take advantage of getting roughly a week off during the play-in tournament and focus on getting things right when their first-round series begins. That's assuming they don't drop into the play-in games, of course.
"We've just got to find that chip on our shoulder, that competitive energy that we had in the beginning of the year, middle of the year," Caruso said. "We've gone through a lot of adversity this year, but so has everybody else. We can't feel sorry for ourselves, we've just got to find a way to get through it."
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